Weapons Failed US During Afghan Fight

Weapons failed US troops during Afghan firefight

By Richard Lardner, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – It was chaos during the early morning assault last year on a remote U.S. outpost in Afghanistan and Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips’ M4 carbine had quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn’t work either.

When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. soldiers lay dead and 27 more were wounded. A detailed study of the attack by a military historian found that weapons failed repeatedly at a "critical moment" during the firefight on July 13, 2008, putting the outnumbered American troops at risk of being overrun by nearly 200 insurgents.
Which raises the question: Eight years into the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, do U.S. armed forces have the best guns money can buy?

Despite the military’s insistence that they do, a small but vocal number of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq has complained that the standard-issue M4 rifles need too much maintenance and jam at the worst possible times…

Army Col. Wayne Shanks, a military spokesman in Afghanistan, said a review of the battle at Kamdesh is under way. "It is too early to make any assumptions regarding what did or didn’t work correctly," he said.

Complaints about the weapons the troops carry, especially the M4, aren’t new. Army officials say that when properly cleaned and maintained, the M4 is a quality weapon that can pump out more than 3,000 rounds before any failures occur.

The M4 is a shorter, lighter version of the M16, which made its debut during the Vietnam war. Roughly 500,000 M4s are in service, making it the rifle troops on the front lines trust with their lives…

Battlefield surveys show that nearly 90 percent of soldiers are satisfied with their M4s, according to Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller, head of the Army office that buys soldier gear. Still, the rifle is continually being improved to make it even more reliable and lethal.

Fuller said he’s received no official reports of flawed weapons performance at Wanat. "Until it showed up in the news, I was surprised to hear about all this," he said.

The study by Douglas Cubbison of the Army Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., hasn’t been publicly released. Copies of the study have been leaked to news organizations and are circulating on the Internet…

One wonders why the Associated Press thought it was timely to bring up a battle from more than a year ago.

Especially after CNN has recently reported that the lesson to be learned from Wanat was that we should not have military outposts.

Even though in the same article they quote Sgt. Mace, who rightly surmises that the problem was:

"He talked about the village next to the base, that it had 300 Taliban, and they couldn’t do anything about it because they were in mosques hiding or with other civilians," says his father, Larry Mace. "They knew they were there and they couldn’t do anything about it and they killed them."

This was also the problem at Wanat, according to the US Army (via Wikipedia):

An investigation by the US Army, completed on August 13 and released to the public the first week of November 2008, found that the Taliban attackers had been assisted by the local Afghan police forces and a district leader. The evidence included large stocks of weapons and ammunition discovered in the police barracks in Wanat after the battle. The stocks were much more than could be used by the villages’ 20-man police force and included dirty weapons which appeared to have been used recently…

The investigation also examined whether the Army had intelligence about a possible assault and whether the troops had access to it. The report found that despite reports earlier in July that 200 to 300 militants had been massing to attack another remote outpost in the vicinity, including numerous reports from local villagers that an attack was imminent, the commanders at Wanat had no reason to expect such a large frontal assault.

The report, however, criticized the “incredible amount of time” — 10 months — it took NATO military leaders to negotiate arrangements over the site of the outpost, giving the Taliban plenty of time to coordinate and plan an attack on the base…

Also according to Wikipedia, the ‘US Army historian’ Mr. Cubbison has written earlier reports that did not cite the M4 as the culprit, but rather faulty decisions by senior commanders:

In July 2009, US Senator James Webb asked the US DoD Inspector General to formally examine the battle and the US Army’s investigation into the event. In his request, Webb cited an unreleased report from the army’s Combat Studies Institute by a US Army historian, Douglas Cubbison, that was sharply critical of the way senior Army leaders in Afghanistan, especially Ostlund and Preyser, acted prior to the assault at Wanat. According to that report, soldiers at the Wanat base were critically short of basic necessities such as water and sandbags and had complained repeatedly, to no avail, that their base was in a precarious position. Cubbison had written the report at the request of Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell IV, commander of the United States Army Combined Arms Center.

According to Cubbison, a few days before the battle, on July 4, a US Army helicopter mistakenly attacked and killed 17 local Afghan civilians, including all of the Afghan doctors and nurses at a local clinic, infuriating local Afghans throughout the area. In response, platoon commander Brostrom and company commander Matthew Myer notified senior commanders that they were worried that a retaliatory attack was imminent and that extra surveillence was necessary. Rather than bolstering security around Wanat, however, US Army leaders at Bagram air base ordered the withdrawal of all intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets from the area. Brostrom’s father, retired Army Colonel David. P. Brostrom, alerted Webb’s office to the Army historian’s report. Said Brostrom, "After I read the report, I was sick to my stomach." …

Seeing that the despicable James Webb has cited Mr. Cubbison, we wonder about his objectivity.

But the Associated Press isn’t going to pass up any opportunity to throw doubts upon the Afghan mission.